What Do Cyborgs Gossip About in (Cyber)space?: Tracing Posthuman Discourses in the Rosetta Space Mission
What Do Cyborgs Gossip About in (Cyber)space?: Tracing Posthuman Discourses in the Rosetta Space Mission

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines machine/human boundary-breaching examples in social media discourse on the Rosetta mission, a recent European space mission to a comet visiting our solar system, in order to speculate on the posthuman and perhaps even post-cyborgian implications of these transgressions.Using Donna Haraway’s conception of the cyborg as a “hybrid of machine and organism, creature of social reality as well as creature of fiction”(1991, 149) as my springboard to critically think through how the machine/human boundary was complicated and made ambiguous during the climax of the space project, I aim to show that the unstaffed spacecrafts of the mission (named Rosetta and Philae) largely fit the Harawayan definition of the cyborg in that they are both discursively constructed ‘living’organisms and artificially made ‘lifeless’ objects. In other words, I argue that the spaceships are indissoluble assemblages of the human and machine; they are ambiguous associations that are made elusive and, somewhat paradoxically, all the more integrated by being spatially and temporally dispersed in cyberspace and outer space.

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